This highly enjoyable parallel biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini was written by Christopher Sandford, a critic and author of numerous books on musicians, actors, and other modern celebrities. Its entirely appropriate that Sandford should write about two men who have been dead for seventy to eighty years, because Conan Doyle and Houdini were pre-eminent celebrities of their own time.
Masters of Mystery is not a true parallel biography of the two men because it focusses primarily on their period of friendship mixed with rivalry and sometimes antagonism. There is some attention paid to the two men's early lives, primarily to accentuate the numerous similarities between them. But the true focus of the book is on the two men's very different experiences with spiritualism and the occult.
Houdini had occasionally dabbled in seances and other occult entertainments during the early part of his career, before he developed the skills and aplomb that made him a successful magician and escape artist. His experiences with the fake mediums and con artists who took advantage of the curious and the griefstricken turned him solidly against spiritualism, and he spent much of his later life working to debunk it all. Conan Doyle's successful literary career made him financially secure and allowed him to explore a long standing interest in the paranormal. He became a passionate proponent of spiritualism during World War I, especially after the death of his own son Kingsley, and spent years advocating for even the most dubious of mediums and claims,most notoriously the Cottingley Fairies.
Houdini and Conan Doyle had met years earlier and had become good friends, even though they had categorically different ideas on spiritualism. Both men tried to separate their personal friendship from their professional differences, not always successfully, and their relationship was strained but not altogether broken by the ends of their lives.
Sandford does an excellent job telling the tale of these two men who were so much alike in personality and temperament but who clashed with each other over deeply and passionately held beliefs. He clearly evokes the spiritualist milieu in which both moved and successfully recreates the controversies and quarrels that divided them. I came away with a great liking for both men, though I think Conan Doyle's eagerness to accept any spiritualist claim, no matter how nonsensical, would have irritated me; while Houdini's absolute cynicism on the subject would have grown just as annoying in time. The book ends after the deaths of the two men with a sad description of the final fates of their families and of their papers and collections.
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